


define them, if you must, by their maddest, blurred edges

by Eat_Your_Heart_Out



Series: I'll Use You as a Makeshift Gauge [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bedelia Du Maurier (mentioned) - Freeform, Chiyoh (mentioned) - Freeform, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Jack Crawford (mentioned) - Freeform, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Will Graham loves being ambiguous, alana bloom (mentioned) - Freeform, do these men have blood kinks? who knows!, i mean post series finale, like directly after, no graphic depictions of violence but a lot of blood mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 10:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27849538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eat_Your_Heart_Out/pseuds/Eat_Your_Heart_Out
Summary: That fall off the cliff was Will's idea of a test of fate. If he wasn't meant to be this way, then surely God would take this opportunity to remove him. Remove them both.A brief moment in the aftermath of becoming.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Series: I'll Use You as a Makeshift Gauge [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2058828
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	define them, if you must, by their maddest, blurred edges

Hannibal doesn’t pick metaphors lightly. He believes that that perceived connection between art and man means something, so much so that even years after that first utterance, he always remembers it. 

In Italy, in the land of Hannibal's own becoming, He said that Will forgives how God forgives and he _meant it_. In the moody dim of his apartment as he stitched Will’s shoulder back together and again, later in the dark of his room that night, he wondered what that forgiveness would have felt like. Will would have done it quick, no matter what Hannibal had implied. He felt too strongly, cared too deeply to truly let him suffer. 

Well, let him suffer physical pain, at least. 

Years later, Hannibal once again found himself talking about Will, though he had never really stopped. He found himself in front of Jack Crawford and feeling a little like a grinning skull, something already long dead and unsettling by its very nature. He smiled his Mona Lisa smile, the thing carved into his face by years of psychiatry that let his audience see what they wanted to see in it. Jack was angrier by the moment, unused to this unhinged, belligerent man that seemed so far from the man he had known and Hannibal delighted in the discomfited light in his eyes. He admited to Jack that he saw him as God because who else could be so singularly loving and cruel all at once? He admitted to seeing himself as the Devil because who else could he call the father of sin but himself as he stood in the lovely glass cage that was consequence of his manipulations? He admitted to seeing Will as the Lamb of God because who else could stand in the glory of God and outshine it by virtue of their very existence? 

Hannibal had not had a design in a very long time. Since that cold winter evening when he turned himself in, he had contented himself with filling others with discontent, making them fear and doubt. He gorged himself with all their negative emotion and the small, fluttering hope that he would see Will again soon, now, tomorrow, _finally_. 

It took a grisly, enigmatic murderer slipping through their fingers like smoke, but eventually, he got his wish. He found himself prickly and toeing the fine line of rude- unwilling or unable to be helpful after so many years of calculated hostility. What does kindness look like when presented to one's would-be killer?

Easy. It looked something like: _You just came to look at me, came to get the old scent. Why don't you just smell yourself?_

Rudeness was more shaped like: _I gave you a child, if you'll recall._

Cruelty, strangely, was a thing that Hannibal seemed to have to drag out of himself in Will's presence. It came as some rough, inelegant sound that didn't seem to come from his mouth at all. It sounded like: _How's the wife?_

Now, _forgiveness…_ that one was a new addition to his admittedly small repertoire of emotion. It had no sound to him yet, just an image and a yearning. Forgiveness, Hannibal imagined in his cage, was the exact shape of Will's careworn pocket knife. He wished he had gotten to feel its dull edges scraping against his ribs.

Of course, like with most things that pertained to Will, Hannibal quickly found that he was wrong. Forgiveness was not a knife at all, but whatever weapon that found its way into Will Graham's hands. Even Hannibal himself, in Will's hands, was both forgiven and forgiving. What else but the Lamb of God could perform such a miracle on him?

That night on the darkened patio of Hannibal's cliffside home, the both of them painted blood-black and moonlit ivory, shaking with exertion and pain, he finally _understood_ the pull of Mass and confession. Will's shaking grasp on his shoulder felt like absolution and the way his long arms wrapped around Hannibal's shoulders- 

Then it was free fall. Then they hit the water. 

It was cold, baptismal, and for a moment, Hannibal feared they might drown. It was only a moment though, because even if they did, this was Will's design and that alone was enough to content him with whatever fate befell them. 

Will's eyes were open, drilling into him in the water. He looked more alive then than he had since Hannibal carved him a smile. Will was the sort of creature that was only truly alive in desperate times and there in the water, there alone with only the moon and a dead dragon as their witness, they were desperate. 

Their hands tightened around each other. They breathed in simultaneously. The world went dark. 

* * *

Waking, or, perhaps more appropriately, resurrection, comes violently. Hannibal chokes back to life, floundering for the briefest moment as he wonders what could have brought him to this rotten-smelling place. Crab in various stages of death and decay line the rooms near him and the smell wafts in intermittently. It's so strong that it almost covers up the most important smell Hannibal can think of: Will

The other man lays on a cot across from him, perfectly conscious and perfectly still, staring up at the corrugated steel ceiling not far from their heads. "We survived," he croaks; he must have seen Hannibal move out of the corner of his eye. "I tested fate and we survived."

"Did you want us to?" Hannibal asks. His voice is sea salt rough too, unconsciously menacing. His "person suit" as Bedelia liked to call it is still rotting in the catacombs of the Norman Chapel. 

"I have become something new. Baptism or drowning death, whatever came out of that water is not what went in," he says slowly, lifting up his hand, clenching and releasing, enraptured. He huffs something like a laugh. "I always did want to be a self contained apocalypse."

over the cloying smell of crab, Hannibal can still smell Will's blood on him somehow- sweet and mixed with Abigail's, bitter and entwining with Florentine wine, broad and roiling as it overpowered the salt of the sea. "Your becoming has left you as something that cannot be contained, Will. You spill out onto everything you touch. You mark it, change it, make it yours."

Will's hand drops heavily to his chest and his head tilts so that he is finally looking at Hannibal. Those pale blue eyes are intent, heavy, and just as alive now as they were in the water. He wonders if, like his person suit, the part that kept him walled off from the world is gone now, too. "Are you saying you're _mine_ , Dr. Lecter?" 

Something about the way Will's voice curls around the word 'mine' makes the muscles in his stomach clench. It's the most casually predatory thing Will has ever said to him and he can't tell if the fingers trailing down his spine are made of want or fear. 

He's always loved it best when it was both anyway. 

Once, when Hannibal was young and naïve, he took a perfectly good doll and broke it. He did this in front of Chiyoh and then convinced her that he was just as broken as the doll, but only he could be fixed. Chiyoh, foolish, lovely Chiyoh, looked into the abyss of his eyes when they were children and when he looked back, he rearranged her insides into something sharper, crueler. He was younger then, hot-headed and drunk on his own genius, so he didn't consider the natural consequences of making something so close to perfection. When Mischa died and he was done making his meal of her, he told Chiyoh the truth. Not all of it obviously, but just enough to have left her tied to Castle Lecter for the last twenty years, patiently gnawing on her own wings to keep what she thought was a monster growing inside _her_ safely contained. He had thought that she was his greatest mistake, the thing he never should have remade, but now he begins to think he was wrong. 

What has he unchained? What beast suns itself next to him, content but only momentarily sated?

The answer is that the beast is Will and that is enough. "I suppose I am," he says easily. Those eyes burn brighter, more intensely. "You have consumed me, Will Graham, and I couldn't possibly ask for more."

Will sighs and finally looks away, face twisted up in disgust. "You will, you always will. 'Enough' is not a word you understand."

He is right, of course. Hannibal is a starving thing that was born hungry- for freedom, for art, for the feeling of soft human flesh between his teeth however he could get it. Will knows this intimately though, so he doesn't acknowledge it. Instead he says, "Where are we? I imagine it has been quite some time since we faced the dragon."

"Crab fisher somewhere off the coast of Delaware. Been about two days since- since Dolarhyde. Captain Johnston comes by to visit every couple of hours, make sure we're recovering from our hypothermia. He has suggested we don't disembark immediately."

Hannibal's eyebrows tick up. "We are wanted men already?"

Will shrugs. "He recognized us, at least. If you have any way of getting access to your money, I suggest you do that now."

Chiyoh will help readily enough and Bedelia… well, she never has been as aware of herself as she thinks. Hannibal begins to order things in his mind, imagining what the best next step will be, readying himself for life on the run again.

Readying himself for life with Will, hopefully. 

"Were you hungry while I was gone?"

Hannibal looks up to find that Will has pushed himself into a sitting position, feet planted on the floor and his shoulders rolling with the rocking motion of the boat. He can't imagine how- his own body is so bruised already that just turning his head to see the other man is a struggle. He tries for nonchalance, strangely uneasy with Will's dark countenance. "Of course. My jailers refused to cook my favorite cuts of meat, so I was often left unsatisfied."

A flash of teeth, an angry, silent snarl quickly tucked behind something pensive. "That's not what I meant and you know it. Dr. Du Maurier said something interesting to me when I went to see her recently. She said that you could daily feel a stab of hunger and be nourished by the very sight of me." Will pushes himself up laboriously and stalks across the small space separating them, frightfully determined. His body blocks out the light from the tiny porthole as he grasps Hannibal's chin. "Tell me, Hannibal- are you still starving, or are you finally nourished?"

For the first time in so very very long, Hannibal is caught completely off guard. This new, aggressive Will is alien to him but not unwelcome. He defies definition in this moment, almost seeming to vibrate without moving at all. He is like a verb made flesh and standing in perfect view, seen but not known. 

But, oh, sweet God, what Hannibal wouldn't give to _know_.

That draws him up short. The last time Hannibal prayed was over the dinner table the day he’d found Mischa’s body and he has not considered God closely since, but now… Well, he has led a long life, awful in the Biblical sense, and he has gone through it mostly undetected until now simply because of his ability to intuit what someone will do next and engineer whatever outcome he would prefer. With Will, nothing is guaranteed, nothing ever quite comes out _right_ , and anything that falls outside of his carefully laid plans seems very much like divinity after so long of simply restructuring reality until it is more to his liking. Will glows around the edges from the light of the porthole. 

Hannibal reaches up to grasp Wills wrist and the fingers on his jaw tighten as if to warn him not to try to remove them. As if he would even _consider_ such a thing. “I am full to the bursting, Will, and yet I am hungrier all the time. Greed has always been my personal sin.”

“I should starve you again. It makes you so much sweeter.”

“I have been called many things in my life, and not one of them was ‘sweet’,” he sneers. 

Will pulls his hand free and smiles with sadistic glee when Hannibal makes an aborted motion to follow him. Instead of leaning back like expected, Will leans in, crowding him back into his pillow, eyes going pale in the room’s bright light. The cot is tiny, smaller than a twin, but Will manages to wedge his legs in on either side of Hannibal's hips, rearing up above him like some venomous snake. He stays like that for a moment before leaning down, that beatific smile getting closer and closer, sincere as the moon in his concern for Hannibal’s discomfort. He shoves his nose into the space where jaw meets neck and inhales lightly, nudging the bony tip just hard enough into soft skin to cause discomfort. He curls there for a single heartbeat of perfect stillness and then savagely bites down on Hannibal’s rabbiting pulse point, lips still curled up in a smile or a snarl. He doesn’t quite break the skin but he worries at it, pulls just slightly like a promise that he _will_ soon enough. 

Forgiveness really is a violence with Will, isn’t it? Whether Hannibal is bled as the precursor to pleasure or death, this feels like a promise that he _will_ bleed. 

He swallows a high, keening whine. Will pulls away, flushed and breathing harshly through his nose. “You’ve never been sweet? You’ve never seen the way you look at me. _Everything_ is sweet with you- the betrayal,” he grabs Hannibal's hand and pulls it to his stomach where the scar tissue is still jagged and rough, easily felt even through his ruined sweater, "and the love."

“What is your design, Will?” he asks, breathing raggedly

“Not this,” he sneers, tearing his eyes away to look at the sparse room they are locked in, the smell of crabs and sea creeping in around the cracks in the door. “I want us to be free. I want you to be able to enjoy your favorite foods again- all of them.” He looks down again, his other hand coming to rest on Hannibal’s neck, soft and warm. “I love you, too, Hannibal. I want us both to eat well.”

Hannibal smiles up at him and he imagines his face is dazed, his eyes far away. This is so perfect it could be a dream. Hannibal realizes there is truly nothing else he could ask for. This moment is idyllic- the sunlight, the uncomfortable beds, the stench of dead crustacean, Will’s weight on him, the ache in his bones from a narrowly avoided drowning death. It’s not _quite_ how he would have imagined perfection a few years ago, but Will has that effect on things for him. Perpetually spinning imperfections into gold. 

He tilts his chin up, pressing his throat more firmly into Will’s steady hand and says, “Whatever you want, Will. I am done moving chess pieces; this is _your_ design, now.” 

Will’s eyes are pale fire. “So it is,” he says, and his hand closes tight on Hannibal’s windpipe.


End file.
